In recent years, ultrasound has received a great deal of attention as a new technique for noninvasive assessment of bone, and numerous attempts have been made to use ultrasound energy for evaluating the condition of bone tissue in vivo, and thus for determining a measure of osteoporosis and assessing bone fracture risk.
In particular, Hoop discloses in U.S. Pat. No. 3,847,141 a device to measure bone density as a means for monitoring calcium content of the involved bone. A pair of opposed ultrasonic transducers is applied to opposite sides of a subject's finger, such that recurrent pulses transmitted via one transducer are “focused” on the bone, while the receiver response of the other transducer is similarly “focused” to receive pulses that have been transmitted through the bone. The circuitry in Hoop is arranged such that filtered reception of one pulse triggers the next pulse transmission; the filtering is by way of a bandpass filter, passing components of received signals in the 25 kHz to 125 kHz range only; and the observed frequency of retriggering is believed to be proportional to the calcium content of the bone. Thus Hoop is concerned only with what he defines to be transit time for pulses in the indicated band.
Pratt, Jr. deals with establishing, in vivo, the strength of bone in a live being such as a horse. In U.S. Pat. No. 4,361,154, the inventor solves the problem posed by measuring transit time from “launch” to “reception” of pulses of 0.5 MHz and 1.0 MHz through the bone and soft tissue, and from measurement of pulse-echo time, to thereby derive a measurement of transit time through bone alone. A data bank enables the evaluation of the bone condition from the measured transit times. U.S. Pat. No. 4,913,157, also granted to Pratt, Jr., operates on the same general principle of transit time/velocity deduction, using the latter preferred frequency of 2.25 MHz as the base frequency of pulsed “launchings” and a technique of matched filtering/Fourier transform filtering for further analyzing received pulses.
Palmer et al. disclose in U.S. Pat. No. 4,774,959 a bone measurement system deriving the slope of the relation between ultrasonic frequency and attenuation of a sequence of tone signals. Being in the range of 200 kHz to 600 kHz, the signals are applied to one transducer and received by another transducer. The passage of the signals between the two transducers with and without the intervening presence of a heel bone is compared, with the assumption that the frequency/attenuation relation is a straight line, i.e., of constant slope.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,926,870 granted to Brandenburger discloses another in vivo bone analysis system which depends upon measuring transit time for an ultrasonic signal along a desired path through bone. A “canonical” waveform, determined by previous experience to be on the correct path, is used for comparison against received signals for transmission through the patient's bone, while the latter is reoriented until the received signal indicates that the bone is aligned with the desired path. Again, ultrasonic velocity through the patient's bone is assumed to have been determined from measured transit time.
Rossman et al. disclose in U.S. Pat. No. 5,054,490 an ultrasound densitometer for measuring physical properties and integrity of bone, upon determination of a transit time through bone. Alternatively, the Rossman et al. device compares absolute attenuation of specific frequency components of ultrasound signals through the bone with the absolute attenuation of the same frequency components through a medium of known acoustic properties.
Mele et al., disclose in U.S. Pat. No. 5,564,423, and in a subsequent related patent by Cadossi et al. (U.S. Pat. No. 6,436,042), disclose a device that measures the “amplitude dependent speed of sound” through a bony member in a living body. The method relies on the visual display of the received ultrasound signal, and the selection of a specific portion of the waveform for analysis.
The prior art, exemplified by the above references that have been briefly discussed, proceed on the assumptions that transit time and velocity—as well as the assumed linear slope of attenuation as a function of a set of discrete frequencies—are all-important in assessing bone. These approaches have essentially been ad hoc, with no consistent framework within which to analyze data. Despite the fact that a rich variety of information is obtainable from experiments with ultrasound (including computer simulations as well as in vitro and in vivo experiments) and that a variety of analytic results are available as well, much of the information has not been used and available, and useful aspects of the data have been ignored.
Significant steps forward in this direction have been made by Kaufman et al. (in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,259,384 and 5,651,363) and by Chiabrera et al. (in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,785,656 and 5,879,301). In these patents, an estimate of a “bone transfer function” associated with a given bone is obtained in a statistically optimal fashion, and parametric estimates of the phase and attenuation functions associated with it are determined. The disclosed methods also describe the use of 2D array transducers for obtaining more reproducible estimates of the bone density, architecture, and fracture risk.
Notwithstanding the advances made in the last-mentioned apparatuses and methods, there are still additional improvements needed in order to accurately and precisely assess the bone density, architecture, quality and fracture risk of a subject. While ultrasound is said to having great potential to assess the biomechanical strength of bone—since it is a mechanical wave in contrast to the ionizing radiation of standard x-ray densitometers—until now much of this potential is unrealized.